How much did this cost? Because I checked the Best Buy site and they have refurbished systems running Windows 10 starting at $110. Granted, the cheapest systems are older, obsolete ones. But for $200-300, you might get something decent.
No, not to my knowledge and not in my experience. In some cases the updates have apparently been quite obnoxious with Windows 8.x, but I’ve been running a Windows 7 laptop for years and recently installed and activated Windows 7 on a desktop and have not been bothered with any forced or even suggested updates.
Assuming it has the memory, that’ll handle Windows 7 just fine, better than my laptop. Windows 10 might be okay, but it depends on the speed of the hard drive. My hard drive was incredibly slow under Windows 10, to the point that I went back to Windows 7.
If you use any accessibility programs, the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is still free. If that works for you, then I’d definitely consider getting Windows 7 and then trying out an upgrade to Windows 10, to see if it goes all right. You’ll have a month to revert.
Microsoft was offering a free upgrade to Win10 to users of Win7 and Win8 - at some point during the lifetime of the free offer, the upgrade was released as a ‘recommended update’ through the normal Windows Update channel - this meant that many users who had their machines set to automatically accept recommended updates found themselves in the upgrade process without really expecting it.
The mainstream free upgrade offer ended in July 2016 - but is still available for anyone who uses accessibility software and solutions - and the criteria for upgrading that way are fuzzy and policed only by honour.
Also, I am aware that a small number of Windows 7 and 8 machines still seem to be getting the upgrade as a recommended update, regardless of the expiry of the offer (I’ve witnessed it happening on three machines now, in the last 6 weeks or so)
There wasn’t, and isn’t any free upgrade path from XP to Win10 though.
Thanks for all the advice.
I now have the machine at my desk and it boots into a legit Windows XP. The ethernet port isn’t working, but I have to put in a WiFi network device anyway.
I gather from the posts above that the practical upgrade is to Windows 10 and that I have to purchase that. My goal is to get the machine functional and legal.
As I mentioned above, the CPU is an AMD Athlon64x2 Dualcore 6000+.
There is a 362 GB HD and 3 GB of RAM.
It has a DVD drive, a couple of SD card slots and a bunch of USB ports. Oh, and a telephone modem card… I haven’t seen one of those in a while!
It appears to be circa 2007.
So, if I upgrade to W10, should I just put in an SSD? Will that noticeably help with performance?
Any suggestions on how to get WiFi into this machine? Card? USBstick? other options?
Thanks again for all your help and suggestions.
What is your intended use for this PC?
From the OP:
In general, running the OS and frequently used programs off an SSD is imo the single biggest performance boost you can have. As in, going back to booting off an HDD is like stepping back to times of yore.
Having said that, your machine is 10 years old, so you need to check what sort of drive is currently installed ie what sort of connectors are in the case. You’ll only get the real benefit of an SSD if it’s SATA, and not PATA/IDE.
If you only have the latter, then maxing out the RAM is your best bet I think.
Those specs are pretty lackluster for 2007, FYI. You’ll pretty much have to get a significant amount of RAM to be able to do much of anything useful with modern software.
Thanks!
So I need an SSD and more RAM.
More than 3 Gigs? Sounds like a modeler’s desktop… 
The Windows 10 machine I am on while I type this, cntrl alt delete says it’s *using *8.2 gigs of RAM. (of 32 total)
I rebooted less than an hour ago, and have only chrome, Edge, skype, Microsoft Visual Studio, and VLC media player open. Oh, and I guess teamspeak and Steam. Hard to do much without all this open and then some. The most memory hungry single process is a chrome tab that is eating about 250 megabytes by itself.
I hope you’re not serious about upgrading the memory and adding an SSD to this system. How much did you spend on a used ten-year-old computer? How much would such upgrades cost? How does that compare to a brand new low-end system?
Yep, I hope you got this system for free, because it’s not worth spending any money upgrading. You could get a brand new or refurbished low end machine for the $200 you’d spend upgrading this obsolete WinXP system. Seriously, the main value a machine like this could have would be the windows license…and your license is for XP, so that’s useless.
But if you want to get wireless for this system something like this is what you want:
A little USB wireless nub, they are dirt cheap nowadays.
Myself, i would probably leave machine as it is, and probably run a linux distro on it, maybe Ubuntu 10.04 or something, and chrome browser.
You could get some memory cheap enough, but the CPU is old architecture and to change that you are going to have to swap out motherboard, cpu, fan, heatsink, ram, possibly power supply, and possibly the case.
If you are going to keep it windows based, i would leave it XP, download XPSP3
Windows XP service pak 3
Maybe even the unofficial SP4
Service pak 4 unofficial
And perhaps a portable version of chrome 48 which should run on XP
Chrome 48 portable
The hardware may not have optimal windows 10 driver support
I would not even buy an SSD just for this, unless you plan to use it elsewhere later
the SSD is worth more than the machine by a long long ways
Funny.
Doesn’t what you “need” open at once kind of depend on what you’re actually doing? From what you describe, it sounds like you’re simultaneously browsing massive numbers of sites with two different browsers at once while talking on the phone, doing software development, watching a movie, and playing games – all at the same time! 
I currently have open: (1) Firefox, (2) Windows Explorer. And I don’t actually need Windows Explorer.
Memory is cheap, sure, and the more the better, up to a point. Many applications will use more memory if it’s available, and a paging OS is specifically designed to do so. But there currently seems to be a greatly inflated idea of how much you actually need. For many application purposes, Windows 7 runs just fine in 2 GB, or less. Windows XP runs just fine in 512 MB. Sure, if you’re actually in the process of configuring and buying memory, I’d recommend sizing it for anticipated usage which would generally mean a lot more, but no one should say such systems won’t work, and perhaps work very well indeed for many modest application mixes. I know the kinds of systems serious gamers need because I’m a father, but most of us don’t need an 8-core i7 or a GPU with a bigger cooling system than a Ferrari, nor do we need the amounts of memory that go with it.
I don’t know what the OP’s options and budget are so can’t comment on what he should do, but the only hardware he absolutely needs is a new disk, and you can buy a 128 GB SSD for $40 or less. The biggest problem is how to get a reasonably modern OS like Win 7 cheap. At some point the hassle just isn’t worth it if you can buy a newer, more powerful computer cheap that already has Win 7 on it.